


Wired Differently

by Impossibly_Izzy



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Autistic Amy Santiago, Autistic Charles Boyle, Gen, Jake Peralta has ADHD, Neurodiversity, Pre-Relationship, Self-Discovery, author is autistic, set in season 2, supportive friends, which relationship? up to you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25318177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impossibly_Izzy/pseuds/Impossibly_Izzy
Summary: Jake has gotten pretty good at pulling Charles out of situations five seconds before he gets too overwhelmed to function - reason #408 why Jake is awesome. (Charles doesn’t have an actual list, but he could probably make one). Occasionally the situation is work-related, but more often it’s a deli with too many possible sandwich fillings.
Relationships: Charles Boyle & Amy Santiago, Charles Boyle & Jake Peralta
Comments: 11
Kudos: 73





	Wired Differently

**Author's Note:**

> This one's pretty different from what I normally write - no romance, for a start - but once I had the idea I had to write it. I tried to keep it as accurate to the characters as possible - it's about exploring them in a way you don't see on the show, not about changing them. Hope you enjoy!

Jake has gotten pretty good at pulling Charles out of situations five seconds before he gets too overwhelmed to function - reason #408 why Jake is awesome. (Charles doesn’t have an actual list, but he could probably make one). Occasionally the situation is work-related, but more often it’s a deli with too many possible sandwich fillings.

‘Dude, just get pastrami,’ Jake says.

‘But I had pastrami yesterday!’ Charles says. ‘What am I gonna do, just eat the same thing two days in a row?

‘You’ve been wearing the same outfit for ten years.’

Which is _true_ , but clothes and sandwiches are two entirely different categories of decision. Sandwiches are _important_. The fluorescent light buzzes overhead. An older woman gives them an irritated look. And he wants to try the special – Chinese-style pork – but what if it’s bad? He only gets to have lunch once per day, tragically, and he can’t waste it on something _bad_. But what if he chooses something safe and misses out on the best sandwich of his life?

He really needs the Boyle Family Decision Manual. Ideally a condensed version for making speedy sandwich-based choices. Also, he’s been standing here dithering for far too long, and the guy behind the counter is looking at him, and why are delis always so crowded? There’s a shelf behind him, Jake and the woman between Charles and the door.

‘Dude,’ Jake says.

‘Sorry,’ Charles says. ‘Sorry – I – I just.’

‘Let’s just go outside for a sec,’ Jake said. ‘I forgot about an important work secret I needed to tell you away from these civilians. We’re cops!’

Gratefully, Charles follows Jake back outside. There’s a breeze out here, and even though it’s noisy and the streets are busy everything feels more spaced out, less urgent. Charles leans against the wall, closes his eyes for a moment.

‘Want me to pick a sandwich for you?’ Jake says.

‘Yes. I’ll give you the money.’

‘Well I owe you, like, a thousand million dollars at this point, so I don’t think you gotta worry about that.’

Another great thing about Jake is that he knows when not to ask questions. Or maybe he’s not being tactful, maybe he just genuinely doesn’t find it weird that delis and supermarkets stress Charles out sometimes. Either way, he doesn’t comment on it. He just leaves Charles to wait outside, and comes back a minute later with two chicken tika subs.

‘Thanks, Jakey,’ Charles says. ‘You’re the best.’

He’s pretty much forgotten the whole deli incident by the time their shift ends. It’s not anything out of the ordinary. As the squad head down to Shaw’s, Jake falls back to talk to Amy, so Charles catches up with Rosa.

‘Hey, gurl,’ he says. ‘Wanna tell me how it’s going with Marcus?’

‘I hate every part of what you just said,’ Rosa growls.

‘Come on,’ Charles says. ‘You _know_ you wanna give me a taste of those juicy deets.’

‘Ugh.’ He thinks that’s it for their conversation, but as they enter the bar she adds, ‘It’s good. We’re going to the theatre next week.’

‘Ooh, what are you seeing?’

‘I’m not gonna tell you that.’

‘Okay,’ Charles says, unfazed. ‘Just know that I approve of your date choices. Drink?’

The corner of Rosa’s mouth twitches with a smile. ‘Beer. Please.’

He buys them both drinks, joins her at the table the squad has taken over.

‘Thanks,’ Rosa says. And then, ‘I’m glad you started sucking less.’ Coming from her, it’s so touching Charles wants to cry.

‘Me too,’ he says.

‘Calm down,’ she says. ‘I just meant you’re more tolerable when you’re not. You know. Pestering me to go out with you.’

‘I wasn’t trying to be pushy,’ Charles says, sincerely. ‘I just, I really liked you. You’re super cool. And I thought if I could just _show_ you how much I liked you…’

‘It’s fine,’ Rosa says. ‘I thought it was sweet. Just don’t be like that with anyone else.’

‘I won’t,’ he promises.

‘Also, try and lay off the sex stuff. You’re gonna get a harassment complaint one day.’

‘What sex stuff?’

Rosa snorts. ‘Everything you say is sex stuff.’

‘I don’t mean to,’ Charles says, helplessly. ‘I’m not, like, thinking about sex all the time. Everyone else just makes it into a sex thing.’

‘Like STDs?’

‘Exactly! It means _save the date_ ,’ Charles says. ‘Whenever someone in my family gets married they give out STDs.’

Rosa laughs, which is disconcerting. ‘Nobody calls them that,’ she said. ‘Trust me, the first thing anyone is gonna think of is _sexually transmitted disease_.’

Charles frowns. ‘Huh.’

‘Hello, everyone!’ Amy says, getting to her feet. Which is unnecessary, because they’ve all been around her all day. ‘I have an announcement to make. I wanted to do it now so I wouldn’t take up any valuable time we could have been working.’

‘Ha!’ Jake says. ‘Nerd.’

‘You could learn something from Santiago’s respect for efficiency and time management,’ Holt says.

Amy frowns at them. ‘This is important to me, and I would appreciate it if you all listened.’

‘Get _on_ with it,’ Gina says, not looking up from her phone.

‘Um. Okay.’ Amy clears her throat. ‘Well, I was recently diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. I have already informed the captain, of course, but I wanted everyone to know.’

‘Oh, one of my cousins has that,’ Charles says.

Rosa snorts. ‘Just one of them?’

Amy gives her a look. ‘That is not helpful.’

‘But he’s not like you,’ Charles says. ‘He’s like, he has trouble with talking, and he never looks at you, and he has all these… hand things.’

‘It’s a spectrum,’ Amy says. ‘Every autistic person is different, but it all comes down to communication styles and sensory differences.’ She sounds like she’s reciting something, like she wrote this out and memorised it. And it’s Amy, so maybe she did. ‘I can try and explain if you have any questions, but it would be easier if I had my binder with me.’

‘You have a binder for it?’

‘Yeah.’ Amy smiles, a little sheepishly. ‘It’s kind of taken over my brain recently.’ She seems to realise she’s still standing, and awkwardly sinks back into her chair.

‘Well,’ Holt says. ‘It takes a lot of courage to say who you are like that. Well done, Santiago.’

Amy glows. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Yeah, good job,’ Rosa says.

Charles is still thinking about it, even as everyone else starts discussing the recent beach house trip. He still doesn’t get it. He loves Amy and he loves his cousin George, but he can’t see the connection between them. George is fascinating to talk to when you get to know him – he knows everything there is to know about handcrafted pasta – but he’s undeniably _different_. His refusal to make eye contact, his stiff body language, the way he never understands when Charles is making a joke. (Which is annoying, because Charles is getting pretty good at jokes. Jake’s influence, obviously.)

Maybe Charles needs to take a look at Amy’s binder.

It’s not a big deal, he could totally wait until Monday and get Amy to show him the binder, but now he’s had the thought his mind is stuck on it. So when he gets home from Shaw’s he grabs his laptop and looks a few things up.

It’s interesting. Complicated. There’s a lot of information out there, and it kind of gives him the Crowded Deli feeling. Like there’s too much for his brain to deal with all at once. He shuts his laptop, and then can’t stop thinking about it until he opens it again.

There are two things going on here. (Four if he counts the anti-vaxxers and the moms talking about how they love their children ‘even though they have autism’, but he pushes those to the side.) There’s the medical sites, full of words like ‘deficits’ and ‘restricted’. Cold, clinical and, honestly, hard to wrap his head around.

And then there are the people. The real autistic people, out there living their lives.

_Any other #actuallyautistic people find themselves, like, absorbing behaviour/speech patterns from their friends? Please say it’s not just me lol_

_That autistic feel when you want to infodump about your special interest but you just KNOW you’re gonna bore them to death_

_If you think I’m mildly autistic, that’s just because it affects YOU mildly!_

Charles isn’t sure what he’s feeling, but he sure is feeling a lot of it.

Once he finally puts his laptop away and gets some sleep, it’s hard to open it again. He wants to, but he doesn’t want to. So he distracts himself. He goes round all his favourite pizza places for his blog, takes careful notes. Crust consistency, sauce to cheese ratio, mouthfeel. It always makes him feel better, even when he’s not sure why exactly he _needs_ to feel better.

It’s like working a tricky case. The evidence is all there, and all it needs now is to sit there in the back of his mind. Give it enough time, and the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

He catches Amy in the break room on Monday morning.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to say, I looked some stuff up and I’m sorry I compared you to my cousin. I know not every autistic person is the same.’

‘Thanks,’ Amy says.

‘Yep,’ Charles says, and then just stands there. He has no idea how to say the next part.

‘You okay?’ Amy says. ‘You look like you’re freaking out.’

Charles is pretty sure he didn’t give his face permission to do that. ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Absolutely top notch. Just tickety boo.’

Amy frowns at him. ‘I know I’m not Jake,’ she says. ‘But we’re friends, right? You can talk to me.’

He takes a deep breath. ‘I read a lot of stuff about ASD and some of it kind of sounds like me? A lot of it, actually.’

‘Oh,’ Amy says.

‘Yeah,’ Charles says. ‘It’s fine. It’s great. I just might have a – a whole thing I didn’t know about for the past forty-two years. Coolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcool.’

Amy bites her lip. Tightens her ponytail. ‘It’s a lot to take in,’ she says. ‘It’s overwhelming. I get it. But the longer you have to sit with it, the more it makes sense.’

‘Yeah.’ It’s too bright in here. The noises of the bullpen seep in: whirring photocopiers, shuffling papers, clicking keyboards. ‘Yeah, I’ll – yeah. Thanks.’

Charles needs to be somewhere else.

He sits with it. Thinks about it. The gears in his brain keep grinding away, picking apart his personality, his body, his whole goddamn life. He remembers trying to pick a tux before he married Eleanor, crying in the tailors because none of them looked right, and they felt too stiff, too tight around his body, and he was getting _married_ and it was _important_. He remembers being a kid at summer camp, when his only friends were the dinner ladies and even they stopped returning his letters by the fall. He remembers his stakeout with Jake – it was only eight days with his best friend, he should have been able to handle it.

There was a possibility he might change his mind, that he might read something that made him think _it’s okay, this isn’t me after all._ But that doesn’t happen. The case is firmly solved.

He finds Jake and Amy at their desks, arguing about something Jake was meant to do for a shared case.

‘Maybe you’d get some work done if you had fewer toys on your desk,’ Amy says.

‘ _Or_ ,’ Jake says, ‘maybe you’d be more fun if you got yourself some stim toys.’ He chucks a plastic cube at her, and she fumbles and catches it. ‘C’mon, Boyle, let’s get some lunch.’

‘We were in the middle of a –’ Amy starts, and then apparently gives up.

Jake pulls his jacket on, tweaks the hood of his hoodie until it sits perfectly over the collar. ‘Okay, _now_ I’m ready.’

It’s a sunny day, but the streets are quiet. New York quiet, anyway. Charles doesn’t know how Amy did this in front of the whole squad at once – he’s always been pretty good at talking about himself, maybe too good judging by some of the reactions he gets, but this is different. The same way sandwiches are different from clothes.

‘I think I might be autistic,’ Charles says.

‘Cool,’ Jake says. ‘Do you wanna go to the bagel place or the deli? Ooh, I meant to tell you, the other day I was at the deli near my apartment and I saw this guy I used to know from – wait, it was probably a big deal for you to tell me that. Sorry. Do you wanna, like, high five?’

‘Yeah,’ Charles says, and they do.

‘What are you gonna do now?’

‘Probably eat a bagel.’

They go to their favourite bagel place: Jake gets an everything with cream cheese, Charles gets a poppyseed with lox. He knows that’s not all Jake was asking, but the question is loaded. It’s an everything question.

Charles has had four decades of people laughing when he wasn’t trying to be funny, frowning when he _was_ trying to be funny. People breaking up with him and saying they still wanted to be friends, and then quickly drifting away from the friendship. People saying _stop staring_ and _read the room._ But none of that really bothered him: as long as he’s got a few good friends, some food, and he doesn’t have to make too many decisions then he’s happy.

But this puts everything into a new context. All those times people gave him weird looks. Every ex and ex-friend who said he was _too much_. Maybe there’s a reason for all those things, and maybe it’s just a new way of describing him, or maybe it makes him _weird_. Different. Broken. The language of the diagnostic criteria is burnt into his brain: _deficits, restricted, impairment._ Thinking about it too hard makes him want to sit under his desk until everything shuts up and goes away.

They walk back towards the precinct, and Charles is glad Jake’s with him because he isn’t really thinking about where they’re going, too lost in his thoughts and trying not to bump into anyone on the sidewalk.

‘I get it,’ Jake says, suddenly. ‘I did some research after Amy told us, and I can totally see how it sounds like you.’

‘Yeah.’ Charles looks up at him. ‘ _Yeah_. I – you don’t think – this doesn’t change anything, does it?’

‘Uh, yeah,’ Jake says. ‘Because now we have another thing in common! Neurodivergent besties for _life_.’

‘I love you,’ Charles says.

And Jake doesn’t back off, doesn’t say _stop staring,_ doesn’t tell him he’s too much. Jake just grins and says, ‘I love you too, man.’ Reason #312 that Jake is awesome.

‘It makes sense that you’d never thought about it before,’ Amy says. It’s a few weeks later, and she and Charles and Jake are eating Chinese food on Jake’s living room floor. (He insisted on hosting even though he only has one couch and no table; the rest of the squad politely declined, except for Gina who wasn’t polite about it.) ‘You’ve got so many autistic people in your family, everything was just _normal_.’

‘I guess we were all just weird together,’ Charles says.

‘It’s not a bad thing,’ Amy says. ‘I’m actually kind of jealous.’

They haven’t talked about it much – there’s always so much else going on, cases to solve, Gina trying to make her dance videos go viral, Hitchcock and Scully setting fire to the break room furniture again. It’s good though, being able to mention it to Jake and Amy whenever he wants. To have people who understand.

Jake is trying to juggle a stress ball and the TV remote. ‘Are you gonna try and get diagnosed or whatever?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Charles says. ‘I don’t know if they’d give me one, anyway – you need to have _significant impairment_. And I hit all the other points, but I’m fine, you know?’

‘Getting a diagnosis can be useful, though,’ Amy says. ‘What if things get harder for you one day?’

‘Maybe,’ Charles says. Another thing to think about. ‘But I already feel different. Just knowing.’

Jake drops the TV remote and the batteries pop out. ‘I totally get it,’ he says, as he tries to slot them back in. ‘When I found out I had ADHD I was like _wait, you mean there’s an actual reason I know_ Die Hard _off by heart but haven’t cleaned my apartment in a month?’_

‘A _month_?’ Amy says, looking uncertainly at the carpet they’re sitting on.

‘Do you really know all of _Die Hard_ off by heart?’ Charles says.

‘Are those the _main_ symptoms of ADHD?’ Amy says.

‘Uh, yeah, that’s why they call it Attention _Die Hard_ Disorder.’

Amy rolls her eyes.

‘Do another one!’ Charles says.

‘Uh.’ Jake pauses, and then grins. ‘ _Amy Santiago_ Disorder! Boom.’

‘That makes no sense,’ Amy says.

‘Shh, let us have fun.’ Jake throws his stress ball at the wall. ‘So the captain is totally autistic, right?’

‘Oh, definitely,’ Charles says.

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone in this fic is still learning, still figuring out what it means to be neurodivergent and how to help each other. Amy’s need for things to be tidy butts up against Jake’s desire for All The Stim Toys, but they’ll figure it out.  
> If you want to read more about autism, the [Autistic Self-Advocacy Network](https://autisticadvocacy.org/about-asan/about-autism/) is a great place to start. [This youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk5aCrQAppGZ8atiOpgYZ1A) has also been really helpful to me. I'm @impossiblyizzy on tumblr if you want to chat about this or anything else!
> 
> I also want to state for the record that I love B99 for its characters and comedy, but I don’t support real-life police forces. If you’re reading this thinking ‘not *all* cops are bad – some of them must be like the ones on b99!’, please take a minute to think critically about the difference between fictional characters written by non-cops, and a real, deeply prejudiced, violent institution. I’m sure you’ve already been bombarded by information all over the internet, but [here](https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/) is a great masterlist of information and resources to help fight racism and police brutality. And [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9w841nrIBg&list=WL&index=12&t=0s) a video that succinctly explains the idea of defunding the police, which is really great if you’re confused about it.  
> I know these topics are overwhelming (especially if you’re the sort of person who regularly gets overwhelmed deciding what to have for lunch, like I am), but it’s essential that we do our best to educate ourselves and make a difference.


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